A Black Ferns loose forward has been named to face France after an ACL injury, as reported by Stuff. Rugby injuries get names, comeback stories and a return date. The injuries in the Stats NZ work-injury tables get none of that, because there is no coming back from them.

In 2024, the most recent year available, New Zealand recorded 255 work-related amputation injuries across all ages and both sexes (Source: Stats NZ, work-injuries-by-industry). That is roughly five a week. Every one is a person who went to work with all their fingers, or a hand, or a foot, and came home without.

Here is the number that reframes it. 255 is the lowest count in the entire 16 years of the series. In 2009 it was 417. That is a fall of 162, or about 39%, and it did not happen in one sudden drop.

The path down was uneven. From 417 in 2009 the count fell to 336, jumped back to 369 in 2011, then dropped hard to 288 in both 2012 and 2013. Then it went the wrong way: 336 in 2014, and 360 in 2015, the highest reading since 2011, though still below that year's 369. So anyone declaring victory in 2013 would have been wrong for two straight years.

Since then the trend has been steadier. The count has not been above 321 in any year since 2016, and it has sat in the 250s to 290s every year since 2020. Group the series into blocks and the shift is clear: the first five years, 2009 to 2013, produced 1,698 amputation injuries. The most recent five, 2020 to 2024, produced 1,371. That is 327 fewer amputations in a comparable stretch of time.

The most likely reading is a mix of things: machine guarding, tighter rules and enforcement, and a New Zealand economy where a smaller share of work involves feeding material into something that spins. The data here cannot separate those causes. It just tells you the outcome moved, and kept moving.

Now the honest caveat. Every single figure in this series is a multiple of three, which is the signature of statistical rounding rather than an exact tally. That means a year-to-year move of 18, like the drop from 273 in 2023 to 255 in 2024, is not a precise measurement of 18 real cases. It also means the difference between 2021 and 2023, both sitting at 273, could be noise. The long arc from 417 down to 255 is far too big to be a rounding artefact. The wobbles inside it are not so safe. And 2024 data is now a year old.

My view: this is the kind of good news that deserves to be said out loud, and almost never is. A 39% fall in the most irreversible workplace injury there is, over 15 years, is a genuine national achievement.

It is also still 255 people. Five a week. The Black Ferns forward gets a return date. They don't.